Ballots languish at City Hall
By: John Upton
November 7, 2008
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| A line of voters forms at San Francisco City Hall on Tuesday. (Juan Carlos Pometta Betancourt/Special to The Examiner) |
SAN FRANCISCO — An unexpected number of San Francisco voters that came to City Hall in the days before Tuesday’s election overwhelmed staff and delayed the counting of ballots, leaving one-third of votes still untallied as of Thursday afternoon.
An estimated 383,000 ballots were cast in this election — about 80 percent of The City’s registered voters, according to information provided to The Examiner by San Francisco’s election chief, John Arntz. With 253,486 ballots counted, about 130,000 ballots cast before the election or provisionally are still left to be tallied.
“We started to get jammed with cards as we got closer to the election. ... Then, at Election Day, you had a good number come back to us,” said Artnz. “So when you go to process it, the volume of ballot cards themselves makes it seem like its going slower than it should be.”
With an expected 20,000 ballots processed per day going forward, the counting will take until the end of next week, maybe longer, according to Arntz, who said he has 400 staff members and temporary workers on the task.
In accordance with the law, the results will be finalized and certified within a month of the election, he said.
At City Hall on Thursday, workers were spread among several basement rooms, opening envelopes, sorting ballots, checking signatures, double-checking each other’s work, unfolding ballots and feeding the ballots through four reading machines, two more than used in previous elections.
While Arntz said the department had braced for the bumper number of ballots predicted for this presidential election, he conceded he was surprised by the flood of voters who arrived at City Hall before Tuesday for early voting.
In 2004 — the last presidential election — 13,500 early votes were cast, according to Arntz. This year, 19,500 early votes were cast, he said.
The influx created lines of early voters on Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday that snaked outside City Hall. In response, about 20 staff members were redeployed from other tasks to help manage the queues, according to Arntz.
“Nothing like that had ever happened before in this city,” Arntz said.
With record numbers of voters predicted for this election, Arntz said he hired 100 more election workers than normal and brought in two additional machines to help sort and count ballots, but the department realized four days before the election it would not
be enough.
By the time the department realized how much work was in front of it, it was too late to boost staff numbers further, according to Arntz.
“It takes time to staff up — you’ve got to bring people in, interview them and train them, so we figured we could have a week of hardship and get through it all with the people on hand,” Arntz said.
